By: Eleanor G.
Easter came this past weekend. I went out on Saturday with a friend and the streets were spotted with grown men wearing bright pink bunny costumes and parents bustling around trying to find enough chocolate to buy. The most common traditions, here in Calgary, are egg hunts and mass. But they do seem to vary from family to family.Of course, there are families who do not celebrate at all; it’s just another Sunday to them. But, like Christmas, nonreligious families celebrate it too, making it a popular holiday, commercialised for all your Easter needs. For those families who are Christian, the celebration begins with Good Friday, the end of Lent. The idea of Lent is to give up something you love from Ash Wednesday, this that was March 5th, until Good Friday. It’s kind of like a belated New Years Resolution, or at least that’s how my dad explained it to me when I was young. On Easter Sunday, also known as Resurrection Sunday, people file into Church to listen to a preacher. Easter Sunday and Christmas morning are two holidays where many people go to church when they usually do not. There were many jokes this year about parking at churches on Sunday and regular churchgoers not recognizing the people there.
The other main way to celebrate Easter is done by the less religious families as well: egg hunts. Traditionally, families decorate hard-boiled eggs the day before and that night the “Easter Bunny” hides them. This varies a lot as well. Some people hide them in their backyards, others do it with other families in a park, some hide them in their houses and the last group, which I am in, don’t hide hard-boiled eggs at all. A growing new tradition began where families hide chocolate eggs covered in brightly coloured tinfoil. I’ve always taken part in this; my mother would go out a week before and buy me and my sister a chocolate bunny and 25 chocolate eggs from Bernard Callebaut or Purdy’s. Even with my sister in university, she sent her some a few days early. The other families who do hide eggs sometimes assign them monetary values or use plastic eggs and hide toys inside.
Whichever way you do it, the children always get something.
